Participant Info
- First Name
- Natasha
- Last Name
- Varner
- Country
- United States
- State
- natasha.varner@gmail.com
- Affiliation
- Website URL
- www.natashavarner.com
- Keywords
- settler colonialism, Mexico, race, immigration, labor, Indigenous history, Japanese American incarceration, health seeking
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
My essays and reporting have appeared in Electric Literature, The Nation, Atlas Obscura, PRI’s The World, Jacobin, and The Abusable Past. I have a PhD in history and my first book, La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2020), was a finalist for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book Award in 2021.
I have subject area expertise in US and Mexican history, with a particular focus on Japanese American, Latinx, Indigenous, and settler colonial histories in the American West, and a penchant for shining a light on underrepresented stories and individuals.
I’m currently an Us@250 Fellow with New America reporting on the decades-long struggle to preserve and commemorate the site of a former Japanese American incarceration camp in southeastern Colorado, as well as the impacts of its new designation as a National Historic Site. I’m also working on a book project about how tuberculosis health seekers contributed to the settlement of the haunted American West. Learn more here.
- Recent Publications
Book
La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico (University of Arizona Press 2020)
Recent Essays and Reporting
The Sunshine Cure, Electric Literature, February 2024
What an Epic Women’s Strike Can Teach Us Over 70 Years Later, The Nation, March 2023
Found: An 80-Year Old Wedding Cake with a Tragic Past, Atlas Obscura, February 2023
Manzanar Children’s Village: Japanese American Orphans in a WWII Concentration Camp, Tropics of Meta, November 2021
Unsettling Settler Belonging in the American Southwest, Abusable Past, October 2020
- Media Coverage
- https://newbooksnetwork.com/la-raza-cosm%C3%A9tica
- Social Media
- @nsvarner
- Country Focus
- US and Mexico
- Expertise by Geography
- Latin America, United States
- Expertise by Chronology
- Modern, 20th century
- Expertise by Topic
- Gender, Indigenous Peoples, Labor, Public History, Race, Women
